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On 13 May 2021, all of the Indian newspapers and media broadcast the singular ghastly tale of hundreds of dead bodies floating in the Ganges and the rivers of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Governments and states were fraught over the numbers and causes of these dead bodies, resulting from COVID-19, further unfolding the nation’s incapacity to mourn the loss of unaccountable human lives. It was a murderous end, leaving behind innumerable aching hearts and tormented existences of children, parents, friends, lovers who had lost their loved ones, with a total denial of dignity in death to the bodies, as well as an abrasive disregard of the needs of the surviving families and friends in search of peace and closure in their loss. An utterly deplorable success of a system that subjugates human entities, their living and also their death.
Traditional Hindu cremation rites comprise burning the body, but all electric crematoriums were flooded with dead bodies waiting in long queues for over twenty-four hours, while manual burning-wood cremations were being sold on the black market. The community-assigned corpse-burners, usually referred to as “doms” a most unfair, unacceptable subjugation to be confined to the lowest caste in community, were desperately seeking ways of survival against ages of destitution by using this catastrophic moment to their momentary advantage. Often generational poverty may harness such violent survival angst that reinforces the misconception that a little power over money can buy omnipotence and invulnerability against a century-long sociopolitical and economic structural oppression. Such brutal actions on the survival continuum often stimulate internal confusion at the individual level, prompting unconscious disassociative processes and disregarding the adversity of others.
Underlying this survival appropriation lies an inherent apprehension of a constant fragile simmering entity fighting against an unempathic system, fearing a total eradic